It’s next to impossible to tell the state Highway and Transportation Department “no, thank you.”
When it gets its constitutionally independent hands on a pot of money and puts its designs on a new swath of pavement near you, you may as well get out your scissors and prepare to cut a ribbon.
“It’s what we do.” That’s what highway director Scott Bennett told me when I wondered years ago why we couldn’t repair and restore the venerable Broadway Bridge rather than build a new one.
They had the money for a new one. They had the right-of-way. They had the master plan. They knew how to build bridges, literally if not metaphorically.
If you wanted, and if your county judge could find the money under sofa cushions, they’d pat your head and put white arches on the sides of this new bridge.
I only hope the white arches don’t get as dingy as the once-white roof on the Verizon Center. That browning image irks me every time I reach the northward crest of the Interstate 30 bridge.
Speaking of the Interstate 30 bridge …
The Highway Department intends to replace it by 2022 as part of a $630 million 10-lane steel-and-concrete monstrosity (12 lanes on the bridge itself) from the north interchange of I-30 with I-40 to the south interchange with I-440.
If you want, it will call four of these lanes — two going each way — collector-and-distributor lanes, which is what you merge into when you’re positioning to exit or enter. That’ll let the Highway Department brand the six new through-lanes the same-six lane freeway existing now.
To placate and bring on board the city powers who abhor the existing and dangerous Second Street/Cantrell exit, it will consolidate all exits in the downtown Little Rock section into one south-bound on or about Fourth Street and one north-bound on or about Ninth Street. That single exit would feature distribution points onto Fifth and Sixth and Ninth Streets.
And, if you want, the Highway Department will pat you on the head by leaving you about 17 acres where those old exits were at Ninth, Sixth and Second streets. Little Rock can feel free to green that up and make it a park.
Never mind that widening urban-center freeways simply draws more motorists until you’re right back where you started. More alternative routes and modes would be the more progressive-minded way to go.
Let’s mention, at least, what Little Rock’s beleaguered progressives have in mind.
They say, sure, build a new freeway bridge, because not even liberals advocate drowning. But they say keep everything six lanes. They say convert the downtown Little Rock section between I-630 and the river to a city parkway that would encourage urban development on both sides. They say steer the cross-country and big-truck traffic onto the loops of I-430 and I-440. They say disperse local cross-river traffic more efficiently by building a new bridge at Little Rock’s Chester Street connecting to North Little Rock’s Pike Avenue.
Here’s what highway officials told me last week about all that, and it wasn’t pretty: They will not build a new freeway bridge right now unless they can do the entire project, because of the way their existing pot of money is categorized. And they will not pay for a new Chester Street bridge because it wouldn’t do anything other than take local traffic off the Broadway Bridge.
Finally, then, we’ve found something the Highway Department won’t build. It’s anything for Little Rock that is substantially and conceptually different from what the Highway Department has in mind.
I suspect the Highway Department would build a Chester Street bridge if a highway commissioner told it to. That’s what being a highway commissioner is all about: You get your transportation prejudices justified, by contrivance if necessary, and obliged.
Little Rock Mayor Mark Stodola, ever trying to balance his tough city’s blue-state progressives and red-state establishment, says he wishes we could do a parkway, but that we can’t absent the Chester bridge.
He says that at least this Fourth Street/Ninth Street exit-dispersal idea — commonly referred to as the “split diamond” plan — makes sense and would give Little Rock a new park that private donors are willing to help develop.
Stodola says those connector-distributor freeway lanes are kind of like parkways, which is the sort of thing a consensus-seeking mayor of Little Rock finds himself saying.
The biggest potential snag on that could be federal regulations on noise pollution in historic neighborhoods such as those along and between westbound Fifth, Sixth and Ninth Streets. But Stodola points out that the current configuration runs interstate-exit traffic directly past arguably the state’s most significant historic structure, the Historic Arkansas Museum.
Stodola says we’re likely down to the “split diamond or a no-build.”
That those aren’t the best choices pretty much goes without saying.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.